Hibernation

Hibernaculum

Prolonged human presence in space has been studied extensively only in Earth orbiting space stations. Manned missions beyond Earth's orbit, require addressing further challenges: e.g. distances exclude effective tele-operation; travel times, distances
and the absence of safe abort and return options add physiological stress; travel times require novel closed-cycle life support systems; robotic extravehicular activities require the development of hardware for semi-autonomous
exploratory, inspection and maintenance tasks, partly tele-controlled by human operators inside the spacecraft. These few examples suggest that if the endeavour of interplanetary manned spaceflight has to become a realistic future
possibility, the technological support to astronauts will need to be substantially developed.

Topical Team on hibernation

The Future Technology Advisory Panel has been created in order to identify ‘enabling’ technologies; these technologies shall enable the potential for scientific discoveries and breakthroughs in future science missions for
ESA. The FTAP prepares recommendations to ESA’s Directorate of Technical and Quality Management regarding enabling technologies for future science projects and on potential actions to implement with respect to these technologies.

Within its mandate the FTAP has identified the controlled use of TOPOR & HIBERNATION as a possibly game-changing technology for human spaceflight. It is conceivable that lowering the metabolic rate of Astronauts would not only
lead to reduced consumption of air, water and food supplies, but it might also lead to a lower susceptibility to radiation damage. However, in order to prepare a recommendation the FTAP needed to substantiate this potential via in-depths
discussions with the relevant scientific community. Therefore a topical team has been created, assembling experts on the topic.

The objectives of Topical Team for Topor & Hibernation are:

- To establish the state-of-the-art on human topor & hibernation research

- To assess the research prospectives in terrestrial areas (medicine, pharmacology)

- To determine a probability based on current knowledge of controlled use of human topor & hibernation being applicable to human spaceflight in a foreseeable future and rough estimates on the timeline, potential showstoppers, and gains.

- To report its findings back to ESA and the FTAP

To achieve these objectives the team has organized meetings with scientific communities on the topic. For efficiency, the coordinator has identify a number of scientists that acted as the core team. Such meetings have enable an efficient exchange of the
most relevant, recent scientific results. In the meanwhile, three successful meetings have been held, two in Frankfurt and one in Koln. The final recommendations are being written up as we speak and will be presented to ESA. Furthermore
the consortium has engaged in writting-up a H2020 proposal on the topic.

News

Recently, this project has been featured in the Washington Post. For more info click here.